Final Fantasy d6 (Complete System)

[Soultastic]

Is there no word on where Dust has disappered off to?

[ThreadOfFate]

We've heard nothing in quite some time. I sent her a PM some time ago and got no reply.

[squiggit]

Profile says their last activity was December 2013. So yeah.

Might be time for someone to do with this project what Dust did with the original project.

[Dragonus45]

That sucks.

Quick question is the version in the OP still the most recent version then? I lost mine and was going to re download it but wanted to check first.

[ThreadOfFate]

I believe so, yes.

[Dust]

Well, hi there!

You lovely people really did deserve to have some more indication as to what happened, but truth be told, I had assumed this project was all but dead and forgotten - at least, until I saw a roll20 game that gave me a nostalgic grin and sent me back here to take a peek.

Truth be told, I actually wound up working in the industry proper, and trading away the FFd6 email account (which was permanently full!) for a professional one (which is even MORE full!) took the wind right outta my sails when it came to hobby-design.

There was also a weee bit of trouble when some internet trolls decided to get involved in my real life, and that killed a lot of enthusiasm I had for working on this.

I'll be around for the next few months at the very least to see if we can't work together to FIX this gosh-danged half-balanced nightmare, and I'll make sure that all of the base files are publicly shared and stuff, too!
The system has never really left my mind - for the last few years, even when working on other projects I've always been making jot notes on an ever-growing 'to be changed' document that's, like....17 pages, now?

I digress.

Hi.

[Temotei]

Well, hi there!

You lovely people really did deserve to have some more indication as to what happened, but truth be told, I had assumed this project was all but dead and forgotten - at least, until I saw a roll20 game that gave me a nostalgic grin and sent me back here to take a peek.

Truth be told, I actually wound up working in the industry proper, and trading away the FFd6 email account (which was permanently full!) for a professional one (which is even MORE full!) took the wind right outta my sails when it came to hobby-design.

There was also a weee bit of trouble when some internet trolls decided to get involved in my real life, and that killed a lot of enthusiasm I had for working on this.

I'll be around for the next few months at the very least to see if we can't work together to FIX this gosh-danged half-balanced nightmare based, and I'll make sure that all of the base files are publicly shared and stuff, too!
The system has never really left my mind - for the last few years, even when working on other projects I've always been making jot notes on an ever-growing 'to be changed' document that's, like....17 pages, now?

I digress.

Hi.

I honestly didn't expect to see you again. Glad you're not dead! Congrats on getting into professional design.

The troll bit sucks, though. Sad to hear it and hope it's stopped.

Maybe we should start a new thread since we're at 49 pages anyway. Might be a good time, eh?

[ThreadOfFate]

Well, hi there!

You lovely people really did deserve to have some more indication as to what happened, but truth be told, I had assumed this project was all but dead and forgotten - at least, until I saw a roll20 game that gave me a nostalgic grin and sent me back here to take a peek.

Truth be told, I actually wound up working in the industry proper, and trading away the FFd6 email account (which was permanently full!) for a professional one (which is even MORE full!) took the wind right outta my sails when it came to hobby-design.

There was also a weee bit of trouble when some internet trolls decided to get involved in my real life, and that killed a lot of enthusiasm I had for working on this.

I'll be around for the next few months at the very least to see if we can't work together to FIX this gosh-danged half-balanced nightmare based, and I'll make sure that all of the base files are publicly shared and stuff, too!
The system has never really left my mind - for the last few years, even when working on other projects I've always been making jot notes on an ever-growing 'to be changed' document that's, like....17 pages, now?

I digress.

Hi.

Holy **** hi! Great to see you back!

Sucks to hear about the trolls bit, stuff like that's been on the rise ever since that GamerGate nonsense started up a few months ago.

Congratulations on getting into the professional field, too!

Yeah, the system isn't totally dead. Sasaisen and I started an offshoot but it petered out fast (though we too have plenty of design documents still hanging around), and I still have the campaign I'm planning on rebooting again be in FF d6.

Great to hear from you again.

[Iwhowrite]

Glad to know your alive (sorry about the trolls, may they forever dwell in loths underbelly). I will be watching with great anticipation.

[Ethaedalus]

Very glad to see you back, I was going to try to get in contact with you, I was going to try and fix the grammar mistakes I had found but didn't since you hadn't been here in awhile.

[Soultastic]

Trolls try to ruin everything. You have people here who are more than happy to see the game system develop. :)

[Creed]

*Praises the return of Dust*

[Soultastic]

There is apparently a subreddit where someone has posted changes and fixes to classes for the system. It's something to look at, if anything.

I'm hiding the link since I don't want to come across as advertising.

Spoiler

Show

http://www.reddit.com/r/FFd6/

It's something you might want to consider if you're going to update the system. :)

[Dust]

So, here's sort of just me summarizing the things which have been touched on the MOST in the last few pages of this thread and various emails.

Intention
This should be a game where people can sit down, throw together a character in half an hour, and not make 'wrong' decisions. It must continue to be a system where 'cinematic' is the key word, and that means continuing to keep the power squarely in the hands of the players and the GMs alike, encouraging creativity and assuming as little as possible.

When constructing boundaries for players, the system will choose silly over realistic every time. Players who wish to play grim members of SeeD or SOLDIER should be able to do so, but nowhere in the rules will it say that a giraffe can't play football monk can't suplex an entire train. I will never expressly suggest an attack may only strike three times if the player wishes to envision it as a hundred rapid blows.

The changes outlined below need to be implemented into a public release version IMMEDIATELY, with numerical balancing to be done as an afterthought over the coming months.

General Changes
Problem: Many of the Jobs and abilities suffer balancing issues.
Solution: I listed this one first because it's so damn important. As expected, huge rewrites will be coming for each of them. The lists are too huge to touch upon here, but know that everything that has been said about abilities ranging from Skillful Hero to Charismagic, from the Dragoon's jump to the Engineer's general level of impotence has been reviewed carefully. I have a good two dozen pages of information to draw upon here and I could talk for days about this, and the enormous amounts of homebrew here is a big help towards making this the BEST chunk of updating that it can possibly be.

Problem: As interesting an experiment as the 4 attribute points were, ultimately it felt like too many things defaulted to each individual stat.
Solution: TBD. I had previously written out a system wherein the current 4 attributes had moved back to the highly-suggested 5. However, Sasaisen's four-attribute summary of Might, Quickness, Willpower and Insight is inspiring and I'd like to talk over that math with him before finalizing decisions here.
Being able to combine a single stat for both magical and physical might will continue as a Shared Ability regardless. From there, how skills are handled will also require tweaking, although not as much as one might expect.

Problem: The Goals system is abusable.
Solution: To be replaced instead by Purpose/Ideals (unsure of the naming scheme I'll be going with) which in turn power your Limit Breaks when threatened. See the following section for details.

Problem: The Destiny Point system encouraged players to hoard these encounter-winning tokens, thus making it impossible to plan encounters.
Solution: The point system is being changed entirely, moving instead to two seperate mechanics. The first of these is the milestone system - several times throughout the campaign, the GM will be able to claim the PCs have hit a major milestone, at which point they can make larger, sweeping changes to their character.
Each Job will have one passive ability (Cover), one pre-built Limit Break (Invincible) and a handful of job-specific abilities (but no 'epic abilities'). Upon reaching a milestone, a character may choose to change jobs, 'master' their current job in order to augment the passive ability further, or build their own limit break while still keeping access to the one belonging to their Job.

Limit points will be tracked separately, and will refresh at the start of each game. You obtain a limit point the first time each game whenever one of the following events occurs:
- The first time each adventure that you are severely weakened by an enemy - 25% health, hit with a majorly debilitating status effect such as petrification, etc.
- One point can be awarded for good rp/keeping the story moving (such as having your character believe a lie the player distrusts)
- An ally is killed.
- You gain up to one point per session whenever your PURPOSE/IDEALS (as listed on your sheet) are challenged/threatened or you actively work towards them.

Limit Points exist for the same purpose they do now - adding a bonus dice to rolls or performing limit breaks.

Problem: Many of the Job Abilities are 'made-up' or from an obscure source.
Solution: The release of FFXIV, FFXV, Type-0, and the upcoming Heavensward expansion for the mmorpg all provide a far larger pool of well-known abilities to draw upon for naming conventions, and will provide a greater flexibility in a job's 'identity' when converted to the tabletop format. The goal is to reduce the list of abilities with no pre-existing parallel to 0.
On a side note, the existence of some of the abilities I tossed in there at the last minute - DRK comes to mind moreso than anyone else - is something that kept me away from this system for a long time. I felt legitimately disgusted by what had wound up in the pdf. More care will be taken in the future.

Problem: Magic beats martial.
Solution: The initial design was for magic to be reliable and powerful at all stages of the game, where elemental weaknesses would be exploited for the equivalent of a 'guaranteed critical' for double damage. Conversely, martial fighters would be about 25% lower at all times but with the capacity to spike up and deal far larger amounts of damage on a critical hit or via personal limit breaks. Through revisions and poor planning, this initial idea was lost.
While returning to that base idea I will be removing the Time Mage job completely from the game and doing a total rewrite on the remaining four types of magic - White, Black, Blue, and Summoning.
For example, the Arcane weapon category, when equipped, will now cause you to deal one fewer damage step in combat at all times. However, they allow you to take spells which restore HP or deal direct elemental damage and change them from a Single target to a Group target at any time, simply by applying this same penalty and reducing their damage step by one. This will cut down on both the total number of spells as well as provide greater divisiveness between martial and magical characters as they must make decisions about specializations.

Problem: Dual-Wielding, man. Like, are you ****in' kidding me?
Solution: I had always claimed that it would be the penultimate trade-off by choosing to be a true glass cannon, purchasing two weapons instead of a weapon and armor. I was absolutely wrong.
Weapons will gain fewer properties overall, Armor will gain more, each character will be able to equip two accessories instead of one, and an accessory-only property will be introduced that grants the wearer ARM or M.ARM as if it was a shield of the same tier to represent defensive 'guard' items, which will be discussed greatly.
Classes which currently do not have access to Dual-Wielding or Shields will gain access to them, but the idea of 'handiness' will not exist. You can still use a massive lance and a shield simultaneously.

Problem: The PDF is ugly, and also, enormous.
Solution: Art has been commissioned to replace the less-attractive portions of the book (such as the crystals by each job ability) and this next revision will have a heavy focus on visual appeal, as well as the complete removal of the monster creation section to be added to the half-finished Bestiary that already exists.



I can't provide any hard and fast deadlines, but for the next three months of my life I'm free 24 hours a day and this is my priority. We'll be treating this project like a graphic designer treats a client - with hands-on updates in rapid intervals instead of long silences with a 'wait and see' approach.

[Dragonus45]

... Its so great to see you back, and right on time for my group to be talking about doing a game of this.

I look forward to seeing the changes.

[Temotei]

Hype! I'm excited. Our group had a two-session game of this going on that kind of died (not because of the system, really, but more because we're flaky). We really didn't do much with the system, so if we play again I'll get back to you with feedback.

Are there going to be "official" character sheets this time around? ThreadOfFate's sheets were pretty good, so maybe you could base a sheet on theirs (or just use them with permission)?

EDIT: Oh, and not sure if this was missed: Dust, we're running up to the thread page limit, so we'll need a new thread pretty soon. I figured it would be best if you made the new thread so you could edit the first post at your leisure, but I'm sure many of us are willing to if you'd rather not for whatever reason.

[ThreadOfFate]

I've got the original files for the character sheets on my desktop, so I'll be ready to make changes to them whenever and upload the new versions. I'm glad I can contribute to this project, even if in just that way, and I absolutely give permission to use them.

If you guys have any suggestions, let me know and I can do mockups sometime this weekend.

[Dust]

You're awesome, Thread.
Let me spend the next few days pounding out the changes that I KNOW I want to do ahead of time and I'll start the new thread with the new pdf.

[Seraphiel]

Dusssst :D. Can't wait to see the new stuff. I love this system :3.

[Dionon]

I know you said each class was going to have their own Limit Break built in, but can we still build our own at preset levels? Cause if not, I honestly don't like that particular change. Half the draw of the game was the customization of the Limit Break system

[Soultastic]

Man. I'm playing a Time Mage in my current game.

Hrm. I'll have to see what's going to happen with this update.
I'm not upset, but it is definitely a game change, to say the least.

[Zartemis]

I started playing FFd6 a couple years ago. Since then we've had some party changes, some hefty delays, and overall some clusterbucky nonsense. Amidst that, I felt FFd6 wasn't quite...right. To me, it felt a bit short, and I was intending to GM something longer, so I started modifying the system, tweaking and expanding. So far, it's been fun. I've made a few new systems, re balanced a bunch of stuff, and I'm having fun, though I'll admit some stress, a ton of confusion, and a ton more procrastination. Right now I'm stuck plucking at the gil economy in terms of expanding upwards and I'm feeling I'm going to have to simply redo the whole scale of treasure distribution. That said, I'm looking forward to the new stuff coming! Something tells me I won't be able to adapt my changes to it too well (I mean, one of my players is a Time Mage, for starters), but hopefully I can garner some inspiration on my end, and I might even run a game in this after the changes are made!

[Ilorin Lorati]

Zartemis, why don't you share the changes you've made? Maybe Dust could pull some stuff out of it?

[elmerg]

You're awesome, Thread.
Let me spend the next few days pounding out the changes that I KNOW I want to do ahead of time and I'll start the new thread with the new pdf.

Wishing you luck, Dust. I've been running a combo of v1.2 and v1.3 while I work on my own adjustments, and I'll say, there's tons of material to choose from nowadays. Just don't go the wholly cinematic route; I'd suggest tying Limit Break-use to something else, as having it tied to 'this philosophical thing for a PC' may not work out, if a GM can't work a way to have that thing come up when a Limit Break would be useful.

[Zartemis]

Zartemis, why don't you share the changes you've made? Maybe Dust could pull some stuff out of it?

I would opt towards the changes being massively embarrassing and stupid in ways I can't imagine, but I guess here's top shelf:
Everything started with me looking at Destiny and going 'oh gosh this is going to be a bother'. So Destiny quickly got turned into a renewable resource. It keeps a semi-sparse rewarding situation, but I took inspiration from Dark Heresy here. Each point has multiple functions in the flavor of 'Spend' (unusable until next Travel Rest), 'Lock' (unusable until specific conditions are fulfilled) and 'Burn' (Permanently spent). This also required a change to Limit Breaks, which gave me the chance to add a system to make Limit Conditions rather than making them reliant on criticals, and to make a Party Limit Break system as well, though that's in the works.

After that, I got ambitious. The plans turned into 'let's expand the whole system. 15 is tiny, so let's go classic and make it a 50 level system'. I wanted it bigger to do more with, while keeping the feeling of rewarding people as they went along. I also wanted to reward class purism a bit more, as the system seemed to favor cross-classing heavily as far as I could see. That said, I didn't want to completely invalidate cross-classing. This brought forth the 'Pinnacles of Mastery' system. Each Job had two Pinnacle of Mastery routes that were either meant to be a different outlook on the Job, or allow the Job to emphasize a role crystal it had/fill a new role. Samurai, for example, received Shogunsblade, a more defensive, physically-focused route that brought taste back to more realistic Samurai, and Shrine Keeper, which emphasized an ability to deal damage with Draw Out and communion with the kami that inhabit their weapons. (I already had a bone to pick with Samurai when mine figured out how to play 'I wipe the map on my turn' efficiently.) I have five Jobs (my party members') plotted out fully for their expanded ability lists and Pinnacles of Mastery, which are received every ten levels in a specific job) and if there's interest in those, I may post them.

Levelup bonuses and such obviously needed to be tweaked, and that's still in the works a bit. Economy needs to be fixed, as there are plans to expand upwards in tiers from 8 to 12. I've conjured a bevy of extra status effects to giggle around with, skill checks are under works...ah, General Abilities warrant a mention. I have outlines to add Summoning Magic as a proper subsection in various forms to enable summon-lovers. The Summon list is also tweaked, though that's more a personal thing for my game, and there are planned I guess Summon Augmentations or Evolutions for later on in my campaign, though I won't talk too much on those in case one of them pops in here.

Monsters are also something I want to toy around with, especially since one of my players is a Blue Mage. Namely, since they have a Shapeshifting Pinnacle of Mastery route, I wanted to go over the abilities, tweak and add to the list, and give them proper tiers to facilitate that.

I can go deeper in-depth about anything above that I have finished and revealed to my players, just ask. For the other stuff, I don't want to get expectations up if they find this because a lot of these changed in-progress.

[Soultastic]

Out of everything you said, I do agree with one thing. More than 15 levels would be fantastic. The game I'm participating in grants levels after a period of time instead of using an experience system. This way he can craft stories and encounters to make the levels feel meaningful and earned with the gear coming out more solidly for the group as a whole.

With 15 levels, we'd have hit the peak of our game a while back and be done with it by now, planning to make a new one or the like. If there were more levels, the leveling for the group could pick up a bit without feeling we're being rushed towards the end.

We're running our 43rd session tonight, and we run it weekly.. and two weeks ago we just obtained level 4. To add to that, we started out at level 2 to give us a more clear concept on our characters. So we've leveled twice in an entire year.

[Zartemis]

Yeah, I've already reworked the XP scale for it, and added Superboss class to the enemy set for that fun, really tough, optional encounter fun. To counter it being a tabletop, I added some abilities and Limit Abilities through the reworked classes that function as 'fight resets' in case of defeat to probe and test harder encounters with. So far it's working well, enemies deliver XP by their class and level.

Edit: Right now I'm working on Monster Abilities. Once I get done with the fun bit of tweaking the current ones and adding the new ones, I have to play around with numbers to tier them and work on their distribution throughout levels up to 50. Overall, their distribution is probably going to get changed if only because the new tiering system I'm going to try to use for them is just asking for it.

[Soultastic]

I'm just almost bursting in anticipation of this update thread coming. :)

The GM of my game has made a summon and is currently thinking of making up his own unique spells. If anything cool comes out of it I might share it here.

[Sparx MacGyver]

Woah! Welcome back Dust! Glad to see you return. Congrats on the good stuff going for you, and sorry to hear about the trolls. I'm sure everybody will be happy with any updates/work you give us.

I think you sent me a message at one point on tumblr, but I never got around to it. I was talking about making lots of changes, but that game concluded early (I posted about it in the worst GM thread), and the ideas I had were either dropped and/or forgotten about, or I re-worked what I did want into either a Savage Worlds or Pathfinder Campaign that I ran after that FFd6 game.

Edit: Found a few notes I wrote from that game. I think most everything is covered by the folks here already. Really, all I can is that multiclassing is a good thing and should be encouraged, but you should also be able to play a single class the entire time if you choose to do so. We liked the color crystal references, kinda made it more flavorful and we didn't have to flip as much (we printed the pdf out..). Most of the other things are bullet points, and I don't really remember why I wrote them down. I have things like weapon and armor expansions - I have no clue as to what I was going to do with that, though it probably made sense to me at the time. That's about it.

Yeah, the system isn't totally dead. Sasaisen and I started an offshoot but it petered out fast (though we too have plenty of design documents still hanging around), and I still have the campaign I'm planning on rebooting again be in FF d6.

I thought I saved a link or subscribed to that thread, but I didn't find it again and wondered what happened to it.

[Sasaisen]

Here's the link. I'd been updating it at a pace that makes glaciers look like Kenyans, but it's not quite dead and I've recently resumed work on it (unrelated to but encouraged by Dust's return). Currently I'm in the middle of a substantial update to combat and will bump it after that is posted.